As Conflict Begins, Researchers Work to Define Humanity's Aspirations for ET

Mar. 21, 2003

by Douglas Vakoch - Social Scientist / Principal Investigator

As the world confronts another war waged between human and human, a group of artists, scientists, and other scholars will meet in Paris to decide how we could tell intelligence on other worlds about another side of humanity: our ambition to be an altruistic species. The workshop, "Encoding Altruism: The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition," will be held March 23 and 24. In their struggle to draft meaningful messages to aliens, workshop participants from many nations will also grapple with some of the most challenging topics addressed by science today, like the evolution of human behavior and the origins of language.

The keynote speaker at the workshop, Canadian anthropologist Jerome Barkow, will draw on his experience as one of the founding fathers of evolutionary psychology, a discipline that attempts to explain behavior in terms of its adaptiveness. Introducing the workshops central theme, he suggests that extraterrestrials might display either or both of two types of altruism: reciprocal altruism and nepotism. In reciprocal altruism, nice-ness is reciprocated with nice-ness, negativity with negativity. Reciprocal altruism is seen, for example, in chimpanzee grooming and food sharing. If Chimp A grooms Chimp B, Chimp A often gets a payback at dinner assuming no more than a couple hours has passed between personal hygiene and meal time. Even reciprocity has its limitssuch as those imposed by the constraints of memory.

In nepotism, by contrast, altruism is extended to one's close relatives, not necessarily with the expectation of direct payback. Rather, by helping relatives, indirectly the altruist also benefits. By increasing the chances that relatives will survive to reproduce, the altruists genes also have an increased chance of being passed on to the next generation, simply because close relatives share a predictable percentage of genes, depending on how closely they are related. Barkow suggests that nepotism may be even more common than reciprocal altruism in intelligence beyond Earth.

Good Neighbors

How does the relative importance of these two forms of altruism among extraterrestrials affect interstellar communication?

Consider first those species in which reciprocal altruism predominates. Might they not be suspicious if we proclaim our willingness to take turns being nice, when each turn of message sending could take centuries or millennia? Reciprocal altruism on those timescales, Barkow argues, becomes meaningless. He suggests that instead, we should emphasize our kinship to extraterrestrials--if nothing else, kinship of a symbolic nature. This might resonate with extraterrestrials who have an inborn proclivity toward nepotism, and might even seem plausible to extraterrestrials who are more reliant on reciprocal altruism, but who exhibit nepotism to a lesser extent.

German theologian Hubert Meisinger, another workshop participant, agrees. According to Meisinger, "to relate all of this to interstellar message design, one has to find ways to communicate that humankind ... has the potential to be friendly, loving, and altruistic toward non-kin individuals or strangers because of its bio-cultural evolution."

But should we really expect extraterrestrials to be sympathetic to our pleas to be altruistic because of the symbolic kinship we might share with them?

Australian archaeologist John Campbell will argue during the meeting that, at least sometimes, we see examples of caring for other species than our own right here on Earth, citing cases from such diverse mammals as carnivores, primates, and cetaceans. Indeed, many of our cultural and religious norms support such other-concern. Oxford University scholar Ulla Lehtonen will emphasize at the meeting ways that indigenous religions focus on forms of altruism that go beyond the concern with other humans. As an example, she cites a painting called Ozone Hole. As she describes the painting, "It depicts an elk whose eye is pierced by a ray of the sun; the presence of a human figure in a ozone hole in the sky implies the cosmological guilt carried by humans in the suffering of the other-than-human world."

According to Lehtonen, a study of indigenous worldviews helps us understand more than altruism. It might also give those from other cultures right here on Earth some experience encountering alien worlds. As Lehtonen puts it, "Indigenous symbols expressing altruism give us yet another way of thinking about communication with other-than-human beings."

Encoding Altruism

Planetary scientist Alfred Kracher, another workshop participant, takes a similar approach, noting that "virtues such as compassion, sacrifice, serenity, etc., have been promoted across diverse human cultures for a long time by the world religions. Symbols of various kinds have been developed to convey these ideas--stories, images, music, rituals, etc." But how does this help design intelligible interstellar messages? In Krachers view, it is exactly the sort of approach that Barkow takes that might help identify cross-species universals, even of artistic symbolism: "Insights from evolutionary psychology allow us to assess which kinds of images and ideas are likely to be the universal results of any evolutionary process." Kracher argues that we might expect symbolic representations of such possibly universal relationships as the parent-child bond.

William Edmondson, of the University of Birminghams School of Computer Science, suggests in his talk that we might not need to convey our altruism through encoded meanings at allit might be enough simply to send intentional signals. In his view, making contact across interstellar space signals altruistic intentions. If communication of any sort is to occur at all over such vast distances, he reasons, great efforts must be made to understand the perspective of the other

Indeed, Edmondson points out the many difficulties humans and extraterrestrials would have to overcome to establish a common ground of understanding. Ideally, he says, we would like to have interactive communication. But given the immense distances between stars, that is simply impossible. A more modest initial goal, Edmondson suggests, is to convey the intention to communicate, providing references to objects known by both humans and extraterrestrials, such as prominent pulsars, an idea harkening back to the Pioneer plaques sent in the 1970s.

David Rosenboom, Dean of the School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts, has a partial antidote to Edmondsons concern that it will be difficult to communicate anything beyond our intention to communicate: send messages that ET can interact with. In his workshop talk, Rosenboom will draw on analogies to experimental music composing, in which the creative process is the responsibility of both the "composer" and the "audience." From this perspective, if we humans send out messages, some day extraterrestrial intelligent beings (ETI) might becomes co-creators of those very messages through their engagement in decoding them. Instead of sending messages containing static, fully-formed representations, Rosenboom suggests that "sending processes that co-evolveeven in ways we may not be able to predictmay communicate far more about us." This weekend Rosenboom will expand on this idea, drawing parallels with genetic algorithms and ultimately suggesting music-like messages tailored specifically to electromagnetic radiation, in effect, creating a new artistic medium.

Language Games

According to Colin Johnson of the University of Kents Computing Laboratory, were going to have a tough time finding a universal language when we dont understand well how even a single language evolved here on Earth. The problem, he will emphasize at the Paris meeting, is that we haven't been able to compare the origin and early evolution of many different examples of language here on Earth. The solution Johnson offers is to draw on the discipline of artificial life, allowing us to simulate the origin and initial development of language many times over. By looking for common patterns in the thousands of examples, we might get a glimpse into possible universalsincluding universals related to cooperationthat could help us communicate with independently evolved beings on other worlds.

But suppose we could succeed in communicate notions of humans cooperating. Wouldnt such a portrayal border on deception, especially as a reflection of a species in the midst of yet another war? As novelist and workshop participant Diana Slattery cautions, "Convincing an ETI, truly an outsider of our altruistic potential as a species, might be a hard sell if theyve had access to our history books, news services, or entertainment channels." Indeed, in the recording attached to two Voyager spacecraft, the hundred plus pictures of Earth lacked any images of poverty, pestilence, or war.

"If some day signals are sent to follow Voyager," Slattery suggests, "the trust displayed in this effortthat we are communicating at allmay be the surest sign of our own potential for altruism. Whatever we decide to communicate," she adds, "we are saying in the act Here we are; please get in touch." How does Slattery respond to the idea that images of altruism are unrepresentative of our day-to-day actions, she suggests that it may be okay to start a conversation that could last for generations by putting our best foot forward. "That we are concerned about how we are perceived," she observes, "that we are considering how to foreground one of our best aspectsthe altruisticseems a prudent way to whisper into the void."

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As Conflict Begins, Researchers Work to Define Humanity's Aspirations for ET